


Painted Man

by magikfanfic



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, M/M, Pre-Rogue One, blood mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-04-29
Packaged: 2018-10-25 09:34:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10761534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: Baze knows when it happens. He can't say how or why or what, but he knows that something has happened, something bad, something to Chirrut.2017 Spiritassassin weekPrompt 6: Soulmate/soulbond





	Painted Man

**Author's Note:**

> Guys. Six fics in six days is....hard. So this one isn't very good, but I set a goal for myself and I mean to achieve it.

Baze knows when it happens. He can't say how or why or what, but he knows that something has happened, something bad, something to Chirrut. It laps at him, pulls at him across the expanse of the universe, across the expanse of the Force, which he has slowly tried to press himself into forgetting, into giving up on because what's the sense of it if it won't help? It just sits back and exists and lets things, terrible, horrible awful things--that can't be denied because he felt the deaths of the Jedi in his soul, a ringing in his mind, a hollow space in his chest that feels as though it can never be filled again--happen. He can't stand for a power like that, a Force like that. It isn't right, no matter what they were taught, so Baze started closing doors, locking his mind, hiding his soul, covering himself in armor and death, chose a gun over a staff, painted himself as another kind of man altogether to fool anyone who looked at him, to fool even himself in rare moments, and left the holy city that bore and raised him. Ran away into space as if the Force and its tendrils weren’t already everywhere, but the distance from Jedha helped him forget.

Now it finds him again, the lash of a whip in the middle of a fight that takes him by surprise, that breaks his concentration and then he is blinking away blood and his face is wet and stinging, but that is not the greatest pain. No, the greatest pain is something else, something dark and sombrous that resonates within his chest and spreads out to every bit of him such that he can feel it in his fingers and in his toes. An ache. A something. Something isn’t right. He needs to get back to Jedha, back home, back to Chirrut, which is where the thread goes, which is where his love flows like a river that never ends, that always has enough water even if it never rains, never snows. Even in death, he thinks, those waters would continue. 

This, then, is a thought that speaks of the Force, of Force sense and Force knowledge, but Baze does not allow himself to go there, does not allow himself to see it even when it is there looking him full in the face like a friend who has been passed over for another, eyes all accusation and mouth frustration. Not today, he thinks, swiping a hand across his face and coming back with fingers stained red. I have no time for you today. Baze can shoulder many battles, but his hands are full. His hands are full with the gun, and he is full of the knowledge that Chirrut is hurt, which takes up all the slots in his heart so that there is not room for anything else. Chirrut always had a way of being bigger than himself, of filling up all the spaces that he entered, and Baze would want nothing less than a man whose soul is large enough to light up all the corners of his own.

He takes his time picking off the troops who got the lucky shot in, who managed to catch him when he was reeling, and he thinks, as he stalks toward the ship afterwards, that the wound is deep and that it might scar but that doesn’t matter. Baze Malbus has never been a lovely man. Chirrut would argue this thought. Chirrut who used to delight in strewing his hair and beard with blossoms and ribbons and beads. Chirrut who would pester him into removing his shirt so that he could paint sacred symbols across his skin with pigments. Chirrut who called him beautiful, breathed the word into his ear and mouth as though trying to force the knowledge into the openings of his body so that it would sink and stick and Baze might believe it. As if he needed it. He has never needed it, but it always pleased him that Chirrut thought it, that Chirrut believed it. 

It troubles him in a fleeting, momentary way that maybe Chirrut will not believe it anymore, does not believe it anymore. Baze has changed himself into a man that is hard to love, hard to look at because he didn’t want anyone looking too hard or too long. Better to be the sort of man that people glanced at and then away, not wanting to draw his attention to them. Under the armor, under the weaponry, under the flightsuit, under the layers of dirt and grime is the skin that Chirrut painted, lightly snapping at him to be still when Baze would twitch as he hit a ticklish spot, though there are new scars there as well. New scars across the whole breadth of him, mountains on a topographical map, and he wonders if Chirrut wants to visit the new lands of him, if Chirrut still wants to visit any part of him at all.

The trip to Jedha is not long, but it feels like an eternity. The medic on board patches his face hastily because Baze keeps glowering and twitching, body an endless source of frustrated motion, which is abnormal for him because he can sit still for hours. It was always Chirrut who needed action, needed stimulation, which was why he chanted his prayers instead of saying them silently. Talking replacing the need to fidget constantly. When they used to meditate together, Baze would help by settling his hands on Chirrut’s legs or leaning his forehead into the other’s because small pieces of contact helped, too. Not just in keeping Chirrut centered but also in deepening that bond between them, that strange river, that thread, the one that is currently practically strangling him with worry, with the sense of something being off, which is why he is fidgeting, which is he why he cannot keep still, which is why he has not slept since it started.

Please, he thinks, reaching out to see if maybe he can feel Chirrut in some way that is conscious instead of just this body dread, but all that happens is that he sinks his fingers into the Force. A feeling that makes him jerk, pull away, slide haphazardly back into himself because he cannot. He cannot deal with it right now. It would be a lie to say that Baze has not wondered whether their bond is Force wrought before. In the temple, he thought it all the time, and Chirrut would proclaim it as happily as if it were any other mantra, any other prayer, how the Force had brought them together, how the Force had bound them, that things were as the Force willed it.

The Force has willed so many things, allowed so many things that Baze isn’t sure he can put his faith in it being the backbone of this knowledge they have, this thing they share. He has never known what to call it, has never found a word for it in the books he has poured through. All he knows is that it exists, no matter how near or far they are from each other, it exists. Sometimes it is stronger than others. Sometimes he can hear the beat of Chirrut’s heart in his ears. It has lulled him to sleep on more than one occasion, the steadiness of it, the knowledge of it continuing its chore out there across the universe. Sometimes, like now, it is body knowledge. It is knowing when Chirrut has fallen and broken a leg (rooftop jumping) or cut his hand (blindfolded sword fight) or just when he is lonely and needs someone near.

It goes both ways because Chirrut has always known things too, though he explains his differently. Instead of feelings or sounds, Chirrut has colors and words. Colors that will streak across his mind and words that will rise to the surface out of nowhere. “I always know,” he had told Baze once, “when they are yours because they matter more than anything else. It’s like they’re surrounded in light. It’s like they undulate and move on their own, craving my attention, needing my care.”

Once they land, Baze loses himself in the throngs of people that cluster in the streets of NiJedha. He doesn’t know where to go, and the sense of something being wrong has only intensified as they got closer, a tightening grip around his head that makes his eyes smart and the cut throb even more. It seems like the edges of his vision are shrinking, making it harder to navigate, and he loses track of the number of times that he bumps into stalls and people who all make as though they are going to yell at him but then back down when they take stock of him, of his size, of the repeater cannon on his back. All they see is the painted man he has become, and this is fine.

It takes too long. He doesn’t know where he is going, and he can barely see; he keeps waiting for a hand to catch his elbow from the shadows, keeps waiting for strong fingers to grab at him and hear Chirrut’s voice like the chords of a song as he inevitably chides him for being away so long, for running so far, for ruining his face and five hundred other accusations, true and pretend and woven so intricately together that it is impossible to properly sort them. Baze keeps waiting for something to clue him in on the fact that he and this weird sense have been wrong, that everything is fine. He keeps waiting; it doesn’t happen. Instead he just continues to stumble through the streets, weaving as if he is drunk, as if he is drugged until, eventually, his fumbling feet carry him to the door of a healer that he knew, once upon a time, when he was a better man.

The door opens before he can even knock, which is good because Baze is not sure that he could knock if he wanted to right now as the world has closed in to almost a pinprick, his vision tunneled and dark at the edges, his entire head a ringing gong of pain. And there is a hand on his elbow, but it is not Chirrut’s hand so he shakes it off as though it burns. “Easy,” the voice says, and it is not one he knows. “He said you were coming, and he wanted me to tell you that you’re late.”

“Chirrut.” It is suddenly the only word that his mouth knows how to speak. 

“Yes.” There is that hand again, the fingers tapping on his arm before settling, and he allows them. For now. “You seem to be in some manner of distress. Let me help you.” The voice, the hand, leads, and Baze follows, tripping and bumping into things still because the grip, the strange blackness around his head has not let up.

What has happened, he wants to ask but cannot make the words rise, cannot tell whether he wants the answer in case the answer is very bad.

“Sit,” the voice says, and Baze sits down.

There is the sound of feet retreating and now it is altogether black and there is nothing. It should bother him, it should startle him, but he is too far removed to be worried, still slid into that weird drunken state. Until the hand settles over his own and everything twists and snaps back to normal. Except for the throbbing of the wound on his face, which continues on.

He knows the hand. He knows those fingers, has felt them trace over his body time and again, has bit at the tips of them teasingly and kissed them lovingly and lingered over how finely crafted they are like sculptures onto themselves. He knows that hand. “Chirrut.” Now that he can focus, now that he can properly see again, the vision in front of him is Chirrut in a bed, Chirrut with bandages wrapped around his head, wound over his eyes, and that explains so much even as it seems to drag all the air out of his lungs in a low moan because what has happened, what has he allowed to happen by being away all this time. 

“Don’t,” Chirrut chides as though he knows where Baze’s thoughts are going before he does, before he can even voice them, just like always.

Baze reaches up to press a hand gingerly against Chirrut’s cheek, and he turns into it, presses into it like he has been starved for contact all this time, which he might have been and that small truth hurts almost as much as the wound on his face. “What happened?”

Chirrut shrugs, light, almost blissful, the way that he always approaches his own injuries, the way that a fool does who has little care about his own body, trusting that it is well in spite of his antics. “The Empire and I do not see eye to eye so they decided to try and take both of mine. The joke is on them, however, if they think that this will bring me over to seeing things their way.” Flippant, uncaring, as though none of this means anything, as though the universe in its entirely is a joke and not a black hole that takes everything away eventually.

“Will they heal?”

There is a moment, a pause, as though Chirrut is lingering on the edge of Baze’s own thoughts about everything, as if he could fall into them, as if he considers it, but it passes. For the moment, it passes. “Too early to tell.”

Baze wonders if that means no because it would be like Chirrut to lie to spare him. “I’m sorry I was not here to prevent it.”

Chirrut catches his hand and pulls it away from his face to kiss it, though it takes five seconds longer than it normally would for him to complete the motion. “It does not matter. I can still see what matters.”

Baze says nothing, cannot find the words to ask what he means.

“I still see your colors. I still read your words. I need nothing else than to see you painted in them.”

**Author's Note:**

> Always on the [Tumblr](http://sarkastically.tumblr.com/).


End file.
